BBcode [quote] tag truncates attributions after the first comma

When quoting someone using the BBcode [quote] tag with an attribution, and that attribution includes a comma, i.e. [quote=“foo, bar”], everything following the comma is truncated, thus:

This is, admittedly, a rather odd use case and one which I only ran into because I’m migrating old WordPress comments over to Discourse and as such had a bunch of generated attributions along the lines of “Foo <foo@bar.quux>, on 2020-10-24 11:31, wrote”.

Easy workaround: lose the commas. But I figured it was worth posting just in case anyone else runs into the same thing.

1 Like

This is how the quote tag works in discourse, so after the comma it’s expecting post, topic, and username. If your put something else, it’s not expected to work.

[quote="Alistair Young, post:1, topic:336217, username:avatar"]

Sometimes it’s possible to track down the correct post to attribute, but others it’s not. If you have the id of the post it’s referring to you could do a lookup and get the info.

2 Likes

I knew about the Discourse-specific format, but I was also somehow under the impression that it would - as an intentional behavior - default to just displaying the tag-text for anything that didn’t parse properly in that format as a way of quoting things from outside Discourse?

I guess that I’m incorrect in that belief, and that being the case, the behavior is explained. Although it would be awfully convenient if there was a quote tag equivalent for quoting from extra-Discourse places.

You could do it with a plugin that would bake the stuff into the posts. If a client asked me to do it, I’d likely do it by moving the quote info into the raw text (like the line above) so that it would work without a plugin.